The Seven Turns of the Snail's Shell: A Novel Read online

  “And the leeks,” Lucie added, her Gallic arms flying. “My leeks for the soup.”

  “We were so looking forward to the morilles.” La Bergère shook his head in disgust.

  The two who had crashed into the wall finally managed to get up and were picking salad greens out of their clothing. The motley army and the stunned paparazzi faced each other.

  In all the chaos, no one had noticed that Narbon was missing.

  Narbon was an old man, but in his Résistance days he was the most athletic of Les Amis, and he was still wiry and quick. As the SAMU sped out of the alley, he scurried into the courtyard of the hotel next door to the restaurant, crossed it, and arrived in the rue du Gros-Horloge just as the truck pulled around the corner.

  Diamanté spotted him. It had been years since the two had seen each other, but the slight profile with the oversized beret and the thick, dark, square-rimmed glasses was unmistakable. He had seen it many times in the shadows, planting dynamite under bridges, behind buildings waiting for rendezvous with escapees, beneath trees in the dark forest waiting for planes. He briefly wondered to himself how André had managed to appear in Rouen at this very moment, but this was no time to question Jacques’ decision. He motioned to the driver to halt.

  “We can’t very well do that, now, can we?” the young man objected. “What do you want us to do? Get out and give a press conference, old man?”

  “Your replacement.” Diamanté pointed to Narbon, now hurriedly approaching. “You realize your absence will be noted if you are not back at your post in two to three hours.” He was correct; the driver was an employee of the British Embassy. It would not be smart for him to be reported missing after his break.

  The driver pulled up, got out, and reluctantly allowed Narbon to take over the wheel.

  “Go around to the main entrance of the restaurant and wait in the bar.” Narbon spoke to him in low tones. “Have a cigarette. Act nonchalant. They are expecting you. You will be driven back to Paris immediately.”

  Narbon hauled himself into the driver’s seat and nodded in Diamanté’s direction. “Jacques has everything under control.” There was no warmth between them. The SAMU lurched and sped off toward their destination, the port of Le Havre.

  “Alors, so, mon frère, why didn’t the Brits get the Yanks to do this job? The CIA or something? They would have been eager to do it.”

  Diamanté gave Narbon a hard look. “No one will suspect a bunch of old fighters like us. We can be trusted to do this quietly. The Yanks would bring in the big helicopters and artillery, probably a tank or two for good measure. And the whole operation would appear live on the evening news…Hollywood style.” He chuckled to himself. Secretly, he liked the Americans, an opinion that he, Jacques, and particularly André Narbon had not shared.

  “Eh bien, André, what brought you to Rouen just at this moment?”

  CHAPTER 6

  I have reached the point where the Seine begins…and ends. Where a story I have in mind begins…and perhaps will end. I sit on a bench on the quay in Le Havre, the wind blowing in my face. The sea is gray, angry, troubled. I taste the salt as droplets of water in the air fall on my lips.

  Anna paused from writing in her journal and stared at a British ship in the dark waters of Le Havre harbor. The quay was deserted. It was misting, overcast, and threatening to rain as a storm approached from the Channel.

  Anna tried to make out some activity at the end of the wharf. Breton fishermen, perhaps coming in with their catch. The wind was blowing stronger, and the light was dimming. The British ship, in full view, seemed to be turning around. As it did, it sent a series of waves into the Channel. Anna closed her journal as a small, white, unmarked truck pulled up to the end of the pier. Next, a yellow military helicopter hovered over the truck and landed behind it, its rotary spinning. From the distance, Anna couldn’t tell what was being said, but it was obvious that someone was motioning to the driver and yelling to him to get out of the cab. Two elderly men jumped out, both in berets. Without hesitation, they ran. Anna stared in amazement as they approached her. They didn’t look back. One of them seemed to have spotted her. He diverted his path to avoid looking her in the eyes. The two disappeared into the maze of corrugated iron warehouses in the streets that made up the port. Anna looked back at what was going on where the truck was parked. All the action seemed to be on the side opposite from her. In an instant, the helicopter took off and was gone. She couldn’t tell where it went because of the storm. It just disappeared into the mist. The truck seemed to have been abandoned.

  I wonder what that was all about, she thought as she opened her journal and briefly sketched the scene.

  Fate had brought both Anna and C-C to the same harbor on that last day of August 1997. Fate could not, however, arrange their reunion. Destiny intervened.

  The only person who saw Anna did not know who she was. With the keen wolf’s eyes, Diamanté had spotted the young woman watching him.

  In Rouen, Jacques turned on the television in the bar of the restaurant. A press conference was being broadcast live from in front of La Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital.

  The princess was pronounced dead at three a.m. Paris time after failing to survive emergency surgery.

  The phone rang.

  “Allô?” Jacques said anxiously.

  “It was a setup.” Diamanté’s hoarse voice was lower than usual.

  Jacques tensed. “What do you mean, a setup?”

  “André and I, we had to escape. I am at the gare in Le Havre.”

  “Where is Charlie?”

  “I don’t know, honestly, Jacques. I think the nurse was killed. I’ll be in touch.” There was a sound of footsteps and muffled voices in the background. The phone went dead.

  Jacques’ chest felt tight, and he was suddenly nauseated.

  CHAPTER 7

  The following morning, September 1, Anna stepped onto rue Beaujon, uncertain where the day would take her. Earlier, she had admitted to Monique over breakfast that there was one person in Paris who might know of C-C’s whereabouts: Elise, the Portuguese concierge who managed his apartment building in the fifth arrondissement. Anna crossed the busy avenue de Friedland. She breathed the familiar mix of diesel exhaust, bakeries, wet streets, and Gitanes. People were beginning to fill the sidewalk cafés, and the vehicle traffic was at its usual frantic pace. As she skillfully dodged an errant taxi that came screeching around the corner, it occurred to her that Elise may not even be still alive. She would be in her seventies by now.

  Putrid smells and the familiar ricocheting sounds of the métro assaulted her senses as she descended into the station at the Arc de Triomphe. It was all so familiar, as if she had never left Paris at all. Knowing that she would be spending some time in Paris, she bought a carnet of tickets at the guichet and plunged into the depths of the labyrinth. As she walked onto the platform, she recalled vividly how in her student days she had always compared descending into the métro to descending into Dante’s Inferno. While some of the stations were clean and well lighted, most were not. The whole system reeked of sewage, garlic, and vomit. She waited for the train to slow and the doors to open, then boarded, holding her breath as she noted that the car was full of people. The overcrowded cars always smelled of human sweat and stale tobacco. The doors slammed closed, and the train lurched. She found a corner and stood, holding onto a metal pole next to her so as not to lose her balance. It wasn’t long to her stop: Maubert Mutualité. Absorbed in memories, she ascended to the street. She knew the quarter well. She had lived there while attending the Sorbonne. It was where she and C-C had met and spent many hours studying together, where they had browsed for antiquarian treasures in the bouquinist’s stalls and, as lovers, walked arm in arm along the quay.

  Suddenly, a soft-beige stone building with seventeenth-century details reared up, beast-like, directly in front of her. The monster enveloped her, drew back on its tall, ground-floor windows, then pitched forward. Its eyes became progressively sm
aller, seeming to squint at her. The tiny mansard windows peeped down from the sloping roof, and the iron railings and protruding sills of the balconies sneered in unison. A huge “No. 4” stared at her from its forehead. Anna blinked. A young man with a cigarette in his mouth stood on the balcony of the première étage. Just as suddenly, the monstrosity shrunk and took its place amongst the others just like it on the street; the young smoker disappeared.

  Anna shook her head, thinking that she must still be jetlagged, when she realized that she was standing directly in front of C-C’s former apartment building. She pressed the main button on the keypad. The heavy, wooden porte d’entrée pushed open easily. It wasn’t locked; the daily mail apparently had not yet been delivered. She peered into the courtyard, looking for any sign of Elise, who could usually be found humming softly to herself while working in the small kitchen garden outside her apartment.

  Elise had lived in the building for over forty years. Her small apartment was on the ground floor, or rez-de-chausée, off the flower-filled courtyard. Elise had told Anna once about how she had come to Paris from Portugal and thought that the city was especially beautiful from the Seine.

  “My husband, Ferdinand, et moi, we lived in this very building,” Anna recalled her saying. “It was the appartement noble. We had a balcony. We went into partnership with a financier and, with one little decrepit boat, we wished to start a business running tourist boats on the Seine. Ferdinand thought it would be a very good business. Eh bien, on the first day out, going only in circles, the boat broke down. Et voilà. We were out of business, just like that. Today, the Bateaux Mouches line is a successful tourist attraction, but unfortunately, we have no connection to it.”

  Elise had told Anna that she never intended to manage the apartment building, but when her husband died in the war, she needed a place to live rent-free.

  Anna had been inside her apartment only once, but she remembered it well. The interior was high-ceilinged and uniquely decorated with antiques that, Anna recalled, gave off a musty scent that she had liked.

  C-C’s apartment was on the troisième étage, overlooking the street. She and C-C would hang over the balcony in the evenings and peer down into that of his neighbor below. An elderly Russian lady with bad legs and a character to match, she would sit out there and drink her glass or two of vodka, dumping the last drops every so often on passersby in the street, usually pretty young women, and mumble an expletive in her native language. It was rumored in the building that Madame Russe, as everyone called her, hardly paid any rent. Anna noted from the street that the apartment appeared to be vacant now. She caught her breath as she looked to the floor above, to the apartment that C-C had occupied. New lace curtains hung in the window, and a child of about six watched her from behind them.

  “Qui est-ce? J’arrive.” Anna recognized the voice of Elise coming from across the courtyard. She still had a Portuguese accent after all these years in France. She was on her knees by a stone birdbath, pruning some hydrangeas.

  “Entrez.”

  “Bonjour, Elise,” Anna called affectionately.

  “Anna. Oh là.” The petite woman rose from her knees with great difficulty. Slowly, painfully, she wiped her dirty hands on her apron.

  The two women embraced, air kissing, les bis style, first the left cheek, then the right.

  “Comment allez-vous, Elise?”

  The older lady gestured and shrugged her shoulders. “Comme ci, comme ça. Some days, they are better for me than others.”

  “I’m back in Paris to do research for a book, Elise. I am an author now.”

  “Félicitations.” The old lady nodded.

  “I thought I would visit you today.” Anna hesitated and drew in a breath. “I wanted to find out if something happened to Charles-Christian Gérard. I haven’t, no didn’t, hear from him…” Damn. She was stammering. She cleared her throat. “Let me start again…” Elise stared strangely at her. “When I left to go back to California, Charles-Christian and I were a couple…in love. Do you remember?”

  “Beh, oui. Let’s sit for a bit.” Elise took Anna’s arm and led her over to a bench under a chestnut tree. She sat down, straightened her apron, and smoothed back stray strands of her salt-and-pepper hair from her forehead with both hands. “I do remember you two coming and going arm in arm. Such a nice young man. He was so… so prévenant.”

  “Yes, thoughtful.” Anna looked up into the tree, feeling a growing lump in her throat. “C-C, as I was fond of calling him, and I used to sit under the cool shade of this tree. We studied here together during many hot summer afternoons. How long did he live here after I left?”

  “Oh, a very short time. He paid his rent until the end of the month, but he moved out in a few days. I kept all his mail, thinking that he would come back, but he never did. The only forwarding address he gave me was his parents’, whom you know I already knew because of my dear husband’s brother. So one day, I bundled up all the letters he had received and sent them to Rouen…to his father, Jacques.”

  “I wrote him several letters. Not one response. Did you ever see anyone visit Charles-Christian after I left? We did have some student friends that he might have invited occasionally.”

  Elise shrugged her shoulders and looked up at the window of C-C’s apartment, as if to try to remember something. “Non…non, enfin, I don’t remember. It was some time ago. Un moment. Oh là.” They sat in silence, listening to the birds chirping in the tree above and the slight buzz of bees in the roses along the wall. Then Elise appeared to have thought of something. She put her bony finger on her chin. “Attends. There was a young lady who came to see him several times. I think the last time was about when he moved out. She was not French. She spoke English. I think she could have been British or American.”

  “Do you know who she was? Did you get her name?”

  “Non, non. Enfin, I don’t remember.”

  “Describe her to me.”

  “Reddish hair, green eyes, tall, eh bien, taller than I am, which is meaningless. Tout le monde is taller than I am.” She smiled as she waved the back of her hand. “She had a rather well-developed poitrine.” She wrinkled her nose as she outlined the image of a large set of breasts with cupped hands.

  Anna’s eyes grew wide. “Reggie? Might he have called her Reggie?”

  Reggie was a classmate of Anna’s and Monique’s. Her boyfriend was C-C’s best friend, Bertrand. She had introduced Anna to C-C. Her nationality was British, but she held a South African passport as well, her parentage being split between England and Africa, and her home also shifted between the two countries. She was in Paris to study French but skipped most of her classes to play around with French men. Monique and Anna disliked her intensely. She was a nonstop flirt and bragged incessantly about how she had stolen boys’ hearts away from the other girls. C-C’s friend Bertrand had been the latest “victime,” as Monique had put it. Anna had always had a suspicion that C-C was targeted as her next conquest.

  “Oui,” Elise said, hesitating. She looked as if she had divulged a secret.

  “Nothing has changed,” Anna told Monique later as they entered the Tea Caddy at No. 14 rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. During their student days, Monique and Anna had met often after classes in the cozy salon de thé with its linen-covered tables, oak beams, and elegant dark wood paneling.

  “Bonjour, Mam’selle, ‘Dame. Vous désirez?” A waiter in black bow tie and starched white apron stood over them. “Un café? Du thé?”

  Anna ordered first. “Un exprès, s’il vous plaît, Monsieur, et le gâteau au chocolat.”

  “Pour moi, un thé et la tarte du jour,” Monique clicked her tongue as she turned back to Anna.

  “What hasn’t changed, chérie?”

  “Well, this salon for starters.” Anna looked around the room and listened for a moment to the sweet sound of clicking spoons and whispered conversation. “The atmosphere is still wonderful, and it always smells so good…like fresh-baked pastries and tea and c
hocolate and coffee. But what I meant was C-C’s apartment building, really—the concierge, Elise, and her Portuguese accent, even the bench under the chestnut in the courtyard.” Anna leaned forward conspiratorially. “Oh, and Madame Russe died. Elise gave me the scoop on everyone who had lived in her apartment building. Bertrand, C-C’s friend, remember him? Well, he is stationed in the military somewhere in Africa or Asia. I forget which. And…do you remember Reggie?”

  Monique nodded and squinted her brown eyes.

  “Eh bien,” Anna went on, “she came to see C-C after I left for California. She must have made a move on him. She showed up several times, and then he moved out.” Anna leaned back as the waiter placed pastries on English Blue Willow plates in front of them. She took out her pen and pretended to concentrate on a map of Paris that she had pasted in her journal.

  “You are first time in Paris, oui?” the waiter asked, nodding in the direction of the journal. “Can I ‘elp you find some place?”

  “I am looking for a hospital. Bon, well, several hospitals.” Anna glanced over at Monique.

  The waiter gave Anna a look of grave concern. “Mais, mais, vous n’allez pas bien, Mam’selle?”

  “Oh, si, si, Monsieur, je vais bien. I am fine. I am looking for someone in Paris. That is all.”

  Monique shifted in her chair. One eyebrow lifted. It was obvious that she was becoming very impatient with the conversation.

  “And he is at a hospital?” the waiter persisted.

  “Oui, un docteur.”

  “Ah oui. C’est normale. But of course.” He set down Monique’s hot water for her tea and hesitated, standing by the table until they looked at him inquisitively. “It is often said that a snail’s shell has seven turns. Do you know that expression, Mam’selle?” he asked Anna as he served her cup of espresso. His intense black eyes fixed on hers.